Game Center.
It may not be as compatible or feature rich as some other alternatives, but this is Apple's new baby and the advantages in the future will surely outweigh all the current disadvantages and limitations

If you are experiencing crashes with OpenFeint, there is no guarantee that switching to Game Center or something else, will rectify them.
The problem is likely to be elsewhere in your setup.

The latest OpenFeint SDK is stable, wraps Game Center, and offers cross-promotional developer-friendly features that you won't get with Game Center alone. You can use it and truly get the best of both worlds. The only compelling reason I can think to stick with GameCenter-only is if you don't care about any of the advanced OpenFeint-specific features and are struggling to keep your app under 20 meg.

Phil

Quote:

Originally Posted by nvx

Game Center.
It may not be as compatible or feature rich as some other alternatives, but this is Apple's new baby and the advantages in the future will surely outweigh all the current disadvantages and limitations

If you are experiencing crashes with OpenFeint, there is no guarantee that switching to Game Center or something else, will rectify them.
The problem is likely to be elsewhere in your setup.

Well if we remove openfeint from our build then everything works dandy. As soon as we put it back in then we get problems when openfeint tries to initialise and when the high score tries to report. It could be something in our code, but given the choice I would rather blame someone else :-)

Well if we remove openfeint from our build then everything works dandy. As soon as we put it back in then we get problems when openfeint tries to initialise and when the high score tries to report. It could be something in our code, but given the choice I would rather blame someone else :-)

lol.. well if you don't handle the implementation correctly its surely is not OF fault..

the thing is most casual player do not know what gamecenter is or what open feint is and they also don't care..

so when you speak about social platforms like this you are aiming at more "advanced" gamers.. and if you get there OF beats GC in pretty much any field.. game center has its own share of problems , like buggy offline functionality etc. etc.

of has been around for quite some time and it is the more robust package at the moment.. and since you can use both.. just use both.. the additional work is low and you satisfy fans of both services.

and again if you got crashes with recent OF builds your definatly doing something wrong..

the white screen bug was well know and fixed some time ago.. so if you still get it.. update your OF sdk.

While crashes are almost certainly a result of improperly implementing OF, the API is not particularly easy to use. Getting OF fully functional requires a multitude of hooks throughout your code.

Worse yet, I've experienced several outright BUGS. Layout problems, rendering issues, unable to connect errors, etc. Strangely, some of the bugs appear to be server side. e.g. It will sometimes stop returning updated achievement info. I had to hack it to show local achievement information before I could ship, because I couldn't count on it behaving correctly in the field.

Talking with my customers, they also appear to prefer Game Center over OpenFeint. While I may lose a few marketing opportunities without OF (e.g. freegameoftheday.com), I think the draw of Game Center beats OF hands down. To the point where pure GC appears to be better liked than the OF/GC integration.

What do you get when you cross Robotron with Bomberman? - Coverfire HD

I initially included OpenFeint in Bubble Pets but pulled it before release and added Game Center instead. I would definitely suggest Game Center.

Apart from stability issues (OF was the only thing that ever caused my game to crash), removing it cut the package size in half and reduced compile time from minutes down to seconds. It was such a relief to remove all those crazy and unnecessary frameworks from the project.

Then again I know devs (and gamers) who swear by OpenFeint and love it, so that's just my $0.02.

OF has marketing and has added features that Game Centre does not have.

The easy option is to use OF and use the wrapper inside that for all Game Centre stuff.

To be honest Game Centre is pretty basic and has lots of problems. OF is stable and does what it does, well.

And if you decide to port the game to Android then OF is the only option to consider really. We looked at putting Game Centre into Jet Car Stunts using OF because we needed the added features but I was shocked to find out about the 25 limit to leaderboards and we need over 70 of them for Jet Car Stunts. That stopped us from doing Game Centre!

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